GOG To Start Selling Movies And TV Shows

Well this is interesting: GOG.com, the digital retailer best known for selling old games without DRM, is branching out into film and TV.

They’re starting small, launching with a handful of independent documentaries for $5.99 a piece in hopes of eventually branching out to studio films and television shows. The folks at GOG are pushing hard on the “DRM-free” angle here too, promising that nothing they sell will be saddled with the copyright restrictions you might get while buying a TV show on iTunes or Amazon.

“Most of [the studios we spoke to] admit that DRM does not protect anything, all protections are cracked on the day of the release of the movie or even before and that there is no DRM that can protect a movie against piracy,” said a GOG representative in an e-mail to Kotaku. “The whole industry knows DRM is just smoke and mirrors and it does not work, so why not abandon it?”

GOG will launch the service with some 20 indie documentaries about gaming and internet culture. The current lineup includes Indie Game: The Movie, Good Game, and Please Subscribe, among others.

It’s an interesting step in the battle between GOG.com and its biggest competitor in the world of virtual game stores, Steam. Earlier this year, GOG announced plans to launch an online gaming client called GOG Galaxy, which offers much of what Steam does, minus any DRM or copyright restrictions.

GOG’s people say they’ve had discussions with film studios about selling some of the bigger shows and films, though they haven’t secured anything yet.

“These are very smart people and they see that the anti-piracy measure does not work at all,” said a GOG rep in an e-mail. “We realize that the movie industry is much older than the gaming industry and it moves slower, with caution. As such, we’ll get started with some real examples to show that it works–hence our first batch of 20 documentaries.”